Anime, games, and anime games

Logograph discussing yaoi

After an inexplicably good summer, 2015 seems like it’s so far an okay year for anime. It’s not terribly horrible like, say, 2010, and it’s certainly better than 2014, for what that’s worth. And this season does look pretty good, but I said the same thing somewhere on the webs back in Spring and we all know how that turned out. But that is in the past! Surely my optimism will not jinx this season!Continue reading →

Oh man, it’s been a long time since I had a hatewatch (well, two seasons actually but that’s a long time for the Interwebs). I was hoping that Winter’s LN trio, whatever they were called, would be one of those. Alas, they were too dreadful to be hatewatched; rumours persist that the North Koreans are using them as torture devices for particularly tough POWs. And so, I was left with Seraph of the End in Spring and I was left with despair and anguish.

2015 continues to be eh in anime, overall. Winter was extremely disappointing while Spring was indeed good, but not quite that great like Fall 2014 was (although I miss that season mainly because it brought upon us GARO: The Animation). And because we crossed into Bizarro World apparently and none of us noticed, this summer does seem to be the season with the most potential this year, despite Summer usually being the shittiest season there is (let us not remember Summer 2010). What new spore of madness is this? Let’s find out!

I have a lot of things to say about this portion of the D’Arby the Gamer’s fight but first let’s start with the fact that Stardust Crusaders takes place in 1987 and that is an amazing-looking game for the era. If I were a child in the 1987 and I saw an NES suddenly play voice samples and real-time 3D graphics my head would explode harder than the Nagasaki atom bomb. For the record, this was the best CGI available at the era.

Yes, I know this is definitely artistic license for the purpose of thrilling because seeing Kakyoin and D’Arby drive vague 8-bit blobs posing as vehicles through a largely featureless 8-bit landscape is boring as fuck. Still, it’s fun to pretend and all. Now with that out of the way, let me ramble about why D’Arby the Gamer’s fight is the best fight in Stardust Crusaders.

So, this episode continues back where the last left off, with Medieval Korea Dandy (Junichi Suwabe can only be parsed as Space Dandy. No exceptions) having the hots for Hak, because what’s a shoujo harem without some good ol’ homoeroticism. So, he sets off to town, seeking to recruit Hak for some sweet lov- err, for Gigan’s pirate crew. Yeah, let’s roll with that.